ULMUS CAMPESTRIS. COMMON SMALL-LEAVED ELM. 
Class V. PENTANDRIA.— Order II. DIGYNIA. 
Natural Order, ULMACE.E. THE ELM TRIBE. 
Fig. (n) represents a flower with its bractea magnified; (6) the styles; (c) the capsules; (d) Scnlytus destructor of the natural size. 
The common small-leaved elm is generally understood to be indigenous to the south of England, though 
the fact has been doubted by Evelyn and others. Several supertitious customs were practised on this and 
other elm-trees by our Saxon ancestors. A canon of king Edgar, in the tenth century, may be thus literally 
translated. “We decree that every priest shall anxiously advance Christianity, entirely abolish all heath- 
enism, and forbid tree-worship, divination with the dead, omens, charms with songs, man-worship, and 
many other illusions which are practised in asylums on elms, (hence perhaps the name Witch of Wych- 
Elm,) and on various other trees, by which many are perverted who ought not so to be.” Dr. Hunter 
justly remarks, there can be no stronger proof of its being known at a very early period, than that many 
compound names of places, of which the word “ elm” forms a part, are to be met with in “Doomsday 
Book,” the drawing up of which was finished in 1086. 
The small-leaved elm grows abundantly in the woods and hedges near London, flowering in April, 
long before the foliage expands. It is a lofty tree, sending off many round, spreading, crooked, leafy 
branches, and is covered with a rugged dark-brown bark. The leaves are elliptical, contracted toward each 
end, doubly serrated, and unequal at the base , they are very rough, wrinkled, and veined, stand alternately 
on footstalks, and are of a dark green colour. The flowers are small, and grow in numerous dense, round, 
dark-purple clusters, from the sides of the branches before the evolution of the leaves, each flower being 
nearly sessile, with an oblong fringed bractea at its base. The calyx is inferior, turbinate, wrinkled, per- 
manent, and divided at the limb into four oblong obtuse segments of a pale brownish red colour. There is 
no corolla. The filaments are four or five, twice as long as the calyx, and bearing dark-purple anthers. 
The germen is oblong, compressed, and supports two styles, which bend outwards, and are terminated by 
the stigmas, which consist of a downy line along the upper surface of each style. The flowers are succeeded 
each by an oblong, wedge-shaped flat pale brown capsule, which has a deep sinus at the extremity, and in- 
closes a single seed. 
The elm attains a large size, and lives to a great age. Mention is made of one planted by Henry IY. 
of France, which was standing at the Luxemburg Gardens in Paris at the commencement of the French 
revolution. One at the upper end of Church-lane, Chelsea, (said to have been planted by Queen Eliza- 
beth,) was felled in 1783. It was thirteen feet in circumference at the bottom, and one hundred and ten 
feet high. Mr. Coxe mentions an ancient elm at Raglan Castle, in Monmouthshire, which was twenty-eight 
feet five inches in circumference near the root. Piffes’ elm, near the Boddington Oak, in the vale of Glou- 
cester, was, in 1783, about eighty feet high, and the smallest girth of the principal trunk was sixteen feet. 
From the planting of Sir Francis Bacon’s elms, in Gray’s Inn Walk, in 1600, and their decay about 1720, 
one would be disposed to assign the healthy period of the elm to be about one hundred and twenty years. 
The health of these must have been, however, affected in some degree by the smoke of London. The 
superb avenue called the “Long Walk,” at Windsor, was planted at the beginning of the last century. 
Most of the trees have evidently passed their prime. The most profitable age of elms, both for quantity 
and quality of timber, is supposed to be about fifty or sixty years. The predominance of resin insoluble in 
water, and not liable to be acted on by the atmospheric air, has been assigned as the cause why the pine and 
the larch are more durable than the silver fir and the spruce. “It is possible,” says Miller, “that the elm is 
injured by too much humidity in the soil upon which it grows ; and the Dutch elm, which is usually classed 
as a different species from the common elm, may be merely the common one debased in the humid soil of 
Holland.” 
